Consider the Authors

In a short Web post, Amazon named its objective (to lower most e-book prices to $9.99 apiece), disclosed what it was willing to offer to Hachette (Amazon would keep a thirty-per-cent share of the revenue from e-book sales, which is lower than it typically takes), and offered some arithmetic to support its position (by one calculation, cheaper e-books sell so many more copies that publishers—and, by extension, authors—can expect higher revenue).